Stone Room Concerts @ Hill Center Featuring Eastern-European Jewish Folk Music with Seth Kibel & The Kleztet

Seth Kibel & The Kleztet will entertain and delight with a program focused on upbeat klezmer music (Eastern-European Jewish folk music) along with some detours into Yiddish folk song, jazz, swing, and the Great American Songbook. Think the Brothers Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and more! Seth and his band will have your toes a-tappin’ and make you want to dance in the aisles. Historical commentary (some of which might actually be true) and humorous anecdotes from Kibel will provide an insightful context for their selections.

Klezmer, which literally means “tool of song” in Yiddish, is the secular folk music of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. In the first decades of the 1900s, this music flourished not only in the Old World but also in the New, in the immigrant community of New York City. There, the sounds of the European “fiddler on the roof” mixed with the sounds of early jazz and Tin Pan Alley. The result was a quintessentially American sound.

Seth Kibel is one of the Mid-Atlantic’s premier woodwind specialists, working with some of the best bands in klezmer, jazz, swing, and more. Wowing audiences on clarinet, flute, and saxophone, Seth has made a name for himself in the Washington/Baltimore region and beyond. He is a featured performer with The Kleztet, Bay Jazz Project, Music Pilgrim Trio, Daryl Davis Band, The Natty Beaux, and more. Winner of 28 Washington Area Music Awards (Wammies), including “Best World Music Instrumentalist” (2003-11) and “Best Jazz Instrumentalist” (2005, 2007-8, 2011-14). His most recent recording, “Clown with a Stick,” was released in May 2023 on the Azalea City Recordings record label. He’s won numerous prizes in the Mid-Atlantic Song Contest (MASC) including the Grand Prize in 2016 and a Gold Prize in 2022. When he’s not performing, Seth lectures on music history for numerous institutions, including the Osher Lifelong Learning programs at Johns Hopkins and Towson Universities. In addition to Kibel, the band features  Sean Lane — piano, Derek Wiegmann — double bass, and Joey Antico — double bass.

David Holiday, a lifelong music aficionado , founded Stone Room Concerts together with his wife in 2012 to bring intimate, high-quality performances by local, national, and international independent musicians to the DMV area. He has curated and hosted well over 200 concerts over the past decade in his home, churches, and Hill Center.